Read Yellow - 'Radios Burn Faster' (Fenway Recordings)
3/5
By: Tim Dellow
There's dust in your speaker-system. Years of flaccid gobshite have left it clogged with a thick smothering of lung-munching debris. And that's crap for fidelity.
To clean, purchase 'Radios Burn Faster', open the CD-draw, remove CD from box, taking care not to soil the non-label side with fingerprints or scratches. Turn the volume up, press 'play' and stand back. You don't really have a choice as it'll blast you to the other side of the room. Feel cleansed by its youthful, cathartic nature.
After almost two years of bands trying so hard to be 'effortlessly cool', this mangling barrage of youthful exuberance is a refreshing treat. Opening with a competent bombardment of tuneful emo-core from the Austin Texas school of rawk, Read Yellow (ask for 'Red Yellow' to avoid the indie-than-thou store clerk scathingly correcting your pronunciation) pull off no-brainer rock and roll on 'Fashion Fatale' a tidy rock song as flippant as its title.
Then the shit hits the Keane fan. 'The Easiest Part of Surveillance' qualifies the noise-mongering punk of the album's start with a darker, emphatic track, in which beats-kick forth monitored by a pensive feedback squeal, eschewing all presidents in favour of a rebounding 'Goo'-ey guitar line.
The thunder of the deep ebb bass claps across your brow, ears already ringing from the cymbal screech before they start to trash the place, chucking an amp through your brain, letting it rebound between your bleeding ears.
The pastiche of Nirvana's 'School', as thick as Mudhoney, that is 'Modern Phobias' leads you on to a more feminine (not only in the switch to a female vocalist) experimental section involving handclaps and Latin beats before 'A Love Supreme' justifies their energy demonstrating a considerate passion for their music and audience.
Read Yellow have condensed a lot into this relatively short album, its three sections creating an uneasiness achieved by seamlessly subverting the listeners' expectations. Having been enticed into the warren by the White Rabbit of hard-edged but tuneful emo-core punk, the band use industrial machinery to destroy the burrow around you, closing off the exits with a smothering of earth, before comforting you with the 'hush hush' of the final track as you slip into darkness, suffocating to the soundtrack of a flickering candle burning the last of your oxygen. Unsettling yes, but being buried alive in catacombs of sound is a far more appealing proposition than sitting through an hour of this year's Travis.
Artists in this article: Read Yellow
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